The FedEx Meal Plan

Continued (page 2 of 3)

I suppose I expected the food purveyors of the world to hear my plan, join hands, sing a round of “It's a Small World,” and make haste for the nearest FedEx drop box. This may have been a touch naive. For one thing, I do not know the words for “obnoxious scheme” in Italian or Japanese. Even in English, the mission proved a hard sell. “That is not something we could possibly do,” the general manager of St. John politely told me. A Bolognese friend living in Brazil burned up his Skype account trying to find a willing partner for me in Italy. “How to FedEx a bollito misto…this is a very difficult thing to explain,” he reported sorrowfully. My contact in Toulouse, France, from whom I'd hoped to procure some cassoulet, had only this to say: “Clearly you are not familiar with the French.”

Old Europe, though, was nothing compared with the legal issues here at home. The great traders of old dealt with sandstorms and tsunamis; they crossed mountain ranges and dodged pirates. My challenge was to navigate something called the Animal Product Manual, a publication of the United States Department of Agriculture. I would have rather had pirates.

At 931 pages, filled with more acronyms than a Tom Clancy novel and more appendixes than a hospital Dumpster, the APM suggests a national strategy of protectionism through sheer confusion. The regulations on receiving gifts of food from foreign countries are buried somewhere among categories like “Powdered Bird Guano That Lacks Certification” and “Commercial Importations of Cooked Meat or Meat Products of Poultry and Fowl from a Country or Region of Origin Known to Be Free from HPAI (H5N1) but Affected with END.” What little I could decipher was not promising: Malaysia, it seemed, was, by USDA standards, a veritable pit of disease, home to “Classical Swine Fever, Exotic Newcastle Disease, Foot and Mouth Disease, Highly Contagious Avian Influenza and Swine Vesicular Disease.” It was amazing I'd even gotten out alive. Sweden was hardly better. That meant that, even for those dishes allowed into the United States, each ingredient would need to be accompanied by reams of paperwork. When I got USDA senior staff veterinarian Christopher Robinson on the phone to assess my plan, he cut handily through the bureaucrat-speak: “I'd say it was pretty much impossible,” he said.

Indeed, while I can't vouch for dirty bombs, bales of heroin, or hordes of illegal aliens, I can report that our nation is perfectly safe from rogue shipments of suckling pig. That's what I had coming in from the restaurant Ibu Oka in Ubud, Bali, where the pigs are stuffed to bursting with shallots, garlic, lemongrass, and chilies, bathed in coconut oil, and then hand-turned before a blazing pyre of coffee branches. The beauty of that description left customs agents at JFK unmoved: The shipment was destroyed. Likewise the noodles from KL. And a shipment of cotechino and tortellini from Italy. I began picturing my house as one of those little bases in Missile Command: Packages of delicious food came arcing toward my door from around the world, only to get zapped at the last moment by authorities at various ports of entry.

*****

clearly, another approach was needed. But while I plotted, I contented myself with domestic goodies.

I am convinced that we are evolutionarily equipped with a gene that makes us forget the taste of North Carolina barbecue, just so we continue to eat lesser foods in between pulled-pork sandwiches. The tub of Allen & Son pulled pork that showed up at my door was every bit as good in Brooklyn as it had been the last time I'd gorged on it at the restaurant's vinyl-covered tables in Chapel Hill. In college my friends and I had stonedly fantasized about being able to be faxed a pizza. This wasn't quite that level of instant gratification, but it was damned close. Even the hush puppies worked well when reheated, though owner and eponymous “Son” Keith Allen had categorically refused to send coleslaw, saying it wouldn't survive the trip in a condition up to Allen & Son standards. “Sometimes I worry about you northern boys,” he told me.

From New Orleans came the muffuletta, a stacked sheaf of sliced Italian meats and sharp provolone stuck between enormous rounds of bread and topped with olive relish. Central Grocery would only send frozen batches of three, but they arrived in surprisingly perfect shape. From New Mexico came a Tupperware container of green-chili enchiladas from a legendary shack of a diner called El Farolito; from Kansas City, Missouri, an order of Arthur Bryant's “burnt ends,” the most grizzled, succulent parts of a smoked brisket.

When a friend said, “You're pretty much obliged to get something from Chez Panisse,” a shiver went up my spine. Alice Waters's Berkeley restaurant is considered the very cradle of the localandseasonal movement. When I asked them to FedEx me a dinner, I was told, with just a hint of Northern California frost, “We don't do takeout.” Undeterred, I dragooned a friend who happened to be visiting the Bay Area into visiting for dinner, ordering an extra entrée, and then shipping me the doggie bag. The short ribs with polenta were delicious but unmistakably tinged with guilt. I felt like I had just peed on Jacques Pépin.

Meanwhile I thought I'd solved my international-shipping issues. It occurred to me that the USDA doesn't police fish, so I switched to an all-seafood menu, carefully avoiding any knowledge of ingredients like chicken stock and butter to preserve deniability when it came to customs forms. From Stockholm's great fish emporium, Melanders Fisk, I ordered fatty Baltic herring—strömming—pickled, and then breaded and fried. Then I breathlessly watched the FedEx tracking page. Sure enough, after a short delay at JFK, the package was released. Emboldened, my Malaysian contact and I switched to a noodle dish that seemed to pass the USDA test—prawn mee, a deeply spicy, complex seafood soup. I watched as it was picked up in KL, cleared Malaysian customs, and took wing across the Pacific. The next morning, it reached Anchorage and then…stopped, held for inspection.